Author Topic: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!  (Read 31725 times)

Offline gnosis

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I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« on: October 08, 2015, 07:33:16 am »
I yearn for the ol days of Xenon II...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCAUTrgso8k

Offline x4000

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2015, 09:20:09 am »
Oh there will be upgrades, you can believe that, heh. :)

This is really more of a roguelike than a SHMUP, though, just to warn you.  Though you will be flying a spaceship around and dealing with other spaceships. :)
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Offline Billick

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #2 on: October 08, 2015, 11:16:30 am »
When you say roguelike, do you mean grid based / turn based, or do you just mean that it's got randomness, and it kills you a lot?

Offline x4000

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #3 on: October 08, 2015, 03:29:46 pm »
Think of a top down methodically-paced realtime Rogue Legacy in space with a really robust item and ability system.
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Offline topper

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #4 on: October 08, 2015, 04:17:18 pm »
Think of a top down methodically-paced realtime Rogue Legacy in space with a really robust item and ability system.

Sounds good to me!

Offline dfinlay

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #5 on: October 08, 2015, 04:17:32 pm »
No offense meant, Chris, but people need to stop using the term Roguelike when referring to games that don't occupy the same design space as Stone Soup, NetHack, ToME, Angband, etc. It's getting to the point where the term is beginning to lose all meaning as a strong descriptor and that when developers use the term, it says very little to the potential customer about the style/genre of the game. If you mean permadeath with high levels of randomness, say that. That alone isn't really a genre.

Offline x4000

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #6 on: October 08, 2015, 05:05:57 pm »
And I don't even mean that!  I mean "similar to other things that call themselves roguelikes."  It's all referential anyway.  I'm not a fan of the term as a descriptor too much either, but I'm trying to communicate briefly and clearly and using the only words at hand that people seem to understand (on average) better than something else generic-ish I might say.

In this case I mean "randomized stuff with floors that you progress through, and when you die the run ends immediately."
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Offline satoru

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #7 on: October 08, 2015, 06:04:30 pm »
No offense meant, Chris, but people need to stop using the term Roguelike when referring to games that don't occupy the same design space as Stone Soup, NetHack, ToME, Angband, etc. It's getting to the point where the term is beginning to lose all meaning as a strong descriptor and that when developers use the term, it says very little to the potential customer about the style/genre of the game. If you mean permadeath with high levels of randomness, say that. That alone isn't really a genre.

I realize there are 'rogue purists' out there stomping out the whole "this isn't a rogue or rogue-lite or rogue-like' thing. But lets face it, the term means much broader things than it did before. And if you want to quickly communicate some fundamental ideas, rogue-like is a legitimate one and that while not adhering to the strict sense of the term, is still a useful broad descriptor.

W'ere sorry us 'casuals' have hijacked the term but it is what it is. And youc ant blame people for using it in its new colloquial use, rather than its previous strict purist interpretation

Offline Tridus

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #8 on: October 08, 2015, 06:17:09 pm »
No offense meant, Chris, but people need to stop using the term Roguelike when referring to games that don't occupy the same design space as Stone Soup, NetHack, ToME, Angband, etc. It's getting to the point where the term is beginning to lose all meaning as a strong descriptor and that when developers use the term, it says very little to the potential customer about the style/genre of the game. If you mean permadeath with high levels of randomness, say that. That alone isn't really a genre.

Words change meaning as genres evolve. Trying to fight it is about as effective as trying to stop the tide.

Hell, just look at what an MMORPG used to be in it's olden days, compared to WoW today, which is functionally a lobby game in a lot of ways. You'd be hard pressed to have anyone take an Ultima Online purist seriously when they try to claim that WoW can't use the term "MMORPG" though.

Offline x4000

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #9 on: October 08, 2015, 07:47:00 pm »
"Lobby game?"  I'm curious about that term.
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Offline Tridus

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #10 on: October 08, 2015, 08:06:15 pm »
It's a term for the matchmaking part of games where you sit in a lobby until the game puts you in a match. So it's a fairly common thing in multiplayer games. The style of play is log in, go to lobby, wait for a match, do match, go back to lobby, wait for another match, etc...

For the type of game where you're using matchmaking to get lots of matches, it works great. MMORPGs are supposed to be persistent multiplayer worlds, though, and were never anything like lobby games in the past (they didn't even *have* match making).

Today, though? The most common thing people do in World of Warcraft at cap is sit alone in their instanced garrison, until the dungeon finder (match making) puts them in a dungeon/raid (match). After that, they go back to their instanced garrison. The whole thing about having one big persistent world where you interact with other people has dissolved into sitting alone in an instanced area until the match making puts you into a group of random people to get some loot. It's got little to nothing to do with what made the earlier MMORPGs what they were, but people aren't demanding that it be called something else.

That's how I feel when it comes to people saying that you can't call something a roguelike unless it's the same thing as what it was in 1998. The genre has moved on.

Offline gnosis

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #11 on: October 08, 2015, 08:15:04 pm »
That was the prime reason for the downfal of WoW: the game moved away from the world and became a huge city/garrison lobby were people show off their mounts,pets,transmogs and their iLvl.

I do agree that the term expanded in the recent years and it has become diluted. And this is me telling you this, I used to be a roguelike purist cardinal more than a decade ago during my university years.

Offline gnosis

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #12 on: October 08, 2015, 08:18:35 pm »
Think of a top down methodically-paced realtime Rogue Legacy in space with a really robust item and ability system.

Sounds good to me!

So upgrades come from your base that you upgrade after your run? What is the base piece? A space station? An armada? A star system? A planet?

Do you have to be destroyed for the next cycle, or can you retreat/withdraw?

Offline x4000

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #13 on: October 08, 2015, 08:37:42 pm »
Whoa, I had no idea about that with WoW.  Thanks for the context.  And what do you mean about its downfall?  I was under the impression it was still having tons of players.  I must be out of the loop.  Although I would not be surprised if the numbers were not near their peak -- how could anything stay like that so very long.

Quote
So upgrades come from your base that you upgrade after your run? What is the base piece? A space station? An armada? A star system? A planet?

Do you have to be destroyed for the next cycle, or can you retreat/withdraw?

Bear in mind that these particular aspects, some of them still need to survive the prototype gauntlet of the next week or so.  But:

1. Your upgrades come from what you do during a run (this is certain).

2. SOME upgrades you will start with from your base based on successes in past runs (this is almost certain).

3. Your base is your mothership/starship/not-sure-the-name-yet larger vessel that you were traveling in, but which is now damaged.  It's your Star Destroyer that you're trying to repair while you fly around in your Tie Fighter, to use an analogy.  I'm not sure on our terminology yet, it wasn't important to me before now.  This is certain.

4. The "dungeons" you go into are asteroids or other large ships involved in a war that doesn't concern you, but that is in the area.  This is certain.

5. You'll probably have multiple dungeons to choose from in your home base area, with different rewards and difficulties associated with them.  This is not certain, but extremely likely.  So the difficulty of your run gets determined partly from this.

6. You almost certainly will not be able to exit a run once you start it.  That would remove all tension in my opinion.  What exactly you lose when you lose a run is not yet something I've decided.  Most likely it will be "you don't progress, and you lose that particular run's seed."

7. If you complete a run, then that helps to repair your broken mothership-thing, which gets you closer to victory.  This is certain, although it won't apply to all runs.  Some runs will be easier ones that you take, knowing full well that you won't get a mothership piece out of it, but you need an easier run for some personal buffs to your tie fighter or whatever.  This is highly likely, but not certain.

8. When you complete a run, some or all of your passive buffs will probably stay with you.  Orbitals, consumables, special weapons, and upgraded weapons probably will not stay with you.  The exact nature of all this is kind of fuzzy to me right now.  I know how the upgrade system will work, but I'm unsure how much I want to let the player carry over between runs.  Too much and the power creep starts to get crazy.  And I want the runs to be sufficiently varied.  Rogue Legacy had a pretty good system for this I thought, where you were making progress in your personal stats between runs but not in great bounding leaps.  Something with that feel is probably what I'll go for, but the specifics there are not nailed down yet.  I know how I want it to feel during a run, and how the mechanics work during a run, but I have not fully reconciled that yet with exactly what can carry over to outside of runs.  At any rate, most likely whatever it is would either only carry over if you win the run, or only the best stuff would if you win the run, or something along those lines.

9. If you don't get destroyed, why don't you get to keep everything from your prior run?  Good question, me.  I'm not sure.  Possibly we will let you keep everything, and the next run becomes kind of a continuation run -- a streak, so to speak.  And then when you die you revert to the starting state, but plus some stats.  We'd then have to creep the run difficulty for each streak you get through, but that might be fun in that it's like "going deeper" in a traditional roguelike sense, but instead you're going into progressively more challenging runs of roughly equal length.  That might be exploitable, though.  At any rate, this sort of question is tangential to the main gameplay and goals, which makes me oh so happy. ;)  We can experiment with that some without having to go back to the drawing board on the prototype or something.  I know how the in-run stuff works pretty completely, and that makes me happy.
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Offline mrhanman

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Re: I want upgrades! give me ship upgrades!
« Reply #14 on: October 08, 2015, 08:54:03 pm »
Think of a top down methodically-paced realtime Rogue Legacy in space with a really robust item and ability system.

Sold! I'll take two, please. :D